For the Return Trip, a Dose of Irish Heritage

GETTING READY At the Aisling Center in Yonkers, classes in Gaelic.Credit
Janet Durrans for The New York Times

Yonkers

WRINKLING her freckled nose in concentration, Brianna Kelly fixed her blue eyes on her instructor and considered the question before her.

“Cén aois thú?” her teacher, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, asked in Gaelic as she leaned in with an encouraging lift of her eyebrows.

The translation: “How old are you?”

“Tá mé ocht bliana d’aois,” the 8-year-old Brianna said in a tentative whisper before breaking into a wide grin as her teacher smiled and nodded in approval.

Thousands of miles from Ireland, at the Aisling Irish Community Center on McLean Avenue in Yonkers, American-born children are nurturing a piece of their heritage: learning Irish dance, listening to Irish music and practicing the Irish language. The goal, the center’s organizers say, is not only to familiarize youngsters with their ancestral background, but to address a trend among Irish immigrants: More are returning home, and when they do, their American-born children need to assimilate into an educational system where the Gaelic language is mandatory in public elementary schools.

“I know she has fun here, but it is a relief to know that these classes will help her on a practical level,” said Philomena B. Kelly, Brianna’s mother, adding that she and her husband, natives of County Louth, plan to move from Tuckahoe back to Ireland in the next two years, this time to County Monaghan.

Keeping up with language and arts requirements can put a child at a distinct advantage, said Thomas W. Ihde, director of the City University of New York’s Institute for Irish-American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, which provides classes in Irish language and culture and helps place instructors at Irish institutes in Manhattan, New Jersey and Westchester.

Most Irish have at least a rudimentary knowledge of their native language, but in recent years, “interest in the Irish language has become stronger than ever,” the Irish-born Dr. Ihde said, pointing to cultural trends like the growth of “Gaelscoileanna,” schools where the entire curriculum is taught in Gaelic, as well as the popularity of an all-Irish-language television channel, TG4. “There is a sort of cultural revival of the Irish language right now.”

That revival is, in part, a reaction to the flow of immigrants from other countries flocking to benefit from Ireland’s booming economy. The trend has reached communities like the one around McLean Avenue that were popular destinations for thousands of Irish immigrants, legal and otherwise, in the 1980s and ’90s.

“There are now more Irish returning home than leaving,” said Deirdre Cullen, senior statistician with the Irish Census, in a telephone interview from Dublin. Based on figures from the 2006 census, Ms. Cullen said there were approximately 50,000 more immigrants entering Ireland than leaving, almost double from the 2002 figures, which had approximately 26,000 more entering than leaving.

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In Yonkers, there were nearly 3,000 Irish-born residents in 2000, but their numbers had fallen to an estimated 2,000 in 2006, according to United States census figures compiled by the sociology department at Queens College.

“There has definitely been a shift in terms of families going back,” said Orla Kelleher, executive director of the Aisling Center. Although she declined to provide a breakdown of attendees for a recent Saturday language session — still spare, but expected to grow to the dozen or so children she said attended in years past — parents of two of the four students in attendance said they were planning to move back to Ireland.

Aisling offers Irish dance and music classes during weekday afternoons. The Irish language course, which costs $100 for an eight-week session, is held Saturday mornings and is based on the same curriculum utilized in the Irish public school system.

Language, music and arts are interwoven through all the classes to help reinforce learning. While Ms. Ghearbhuigh, who is volunteering at Aisling, was helping the small group of children navigate their way through the first day of language classes, there was a larger crowd of nine youngsters downstairs clad in “Ghillies” and bubble socks warming up as their Irish step-dance instructor, Deirdre T. O’Mara, counted in Gaelic. “Aon Dó, Trí, Ceathair, Cúig, Sé ... ”

Not all attendees on a recent Saturday morning intend to move to Ireland. Stephen O. Kerrigan, of South Salem, enrolled his daughter, Fiona, 7, in the Gaelic class so she would have an understanding of where her grandparents came from. “These classes provide a cultural connection, regardless of direct lineage,” he said.

The best cultural intentions are not always met with enthusiasm, however. Ms. Kelly, for example, said that her 17-year-old daughter, Christina, born and raised in the United States, plans to attend college here. By contrast, her younger sister, Brianna, nodded and giggled when asked whether she looked forward to wearing a uniform and being with other Irish schoolgirls.

That, of course, is the point of the Gaelic lessons. Orla Clancy, 12, moved to Loughrea, in County Galway, with her family last summer, after living in Westchester for 11 years. In a telephone interview from Ireland, her mother, Mary Clancy, a former executive at PepsiCo, credited Orla’s easy assimilation into the public school system with the language and dance classes she took at Aisling.

“Having done Irish in New York at the weekends made the transition so much easier,” she said. “The foundation she received proved itself true.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 14WE1 of the New York edition with the headline: For the Return Trip, a Dose of Irish Heritage. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe